"I Am Not a Failure"

Early in 1973, Washington Post Reporter Sally Quinn went to a party at the Manhattan home of Barbara Walters, queen of NBC's morning Today show. Quinn noticed that her hostess's bedside alarm clock was set for 4 a.m. "If they paid me a million dollars, I would never accept Barbara Walters' job," she told a friend that night. "That is simply no way to live."

Less than six months later, Quinn was taking somewhat less than a million ($944,000 less, to be exact) for the privilege of rising at an even ungodlier 1:30 a.m. to be co-host of the CBS Morning News. Though totally innocent of television experience, Quinn had won, at age 32, a much publicized CBS talent hunt for a woman to challenge Walters' dominance of early-morning TV. As Quinn tells it in We're Going to Make You a Star (to be published next month by Simon & Schuster, $7.95), her decision to leave newspaper journalism was the biggest mistake of her life.

Quinn's recollections are as self-vindicating as those of an unsuccessful presidential candidate, but if one accepts her tale, she does have some grounds for griping. First she was wooed to TV at a series of high-powered executive lunches with CBS Vice President Gordon Manning (who was transferred to another job at CBS shortly after the Quinn fiasco and is now an executive producer for NBC). Then she claims to have been thrust on the screen with almost no coaching, no voice lessons and hardly a word from Morning News Producer Lee Townsend about the technical details of broadcasting. She reports that she did not even know the meaning of the little red light that indicates when a camera is running--although why, as a good reporter, she did not ask anyone about it is not clear. The tension led to an embarrassingly stubborn case of acne, and Quinn found herself drinking heavily in the afternoon to help her sleep, until a doctor told her to stop because she was developing an ulcer.

Quinn and Co-Host Hughes Rudd were often not even told in advance who the day's guests would be. Frustrated and discouraged, Quinn stopped reading the books of authors she knew she had to interview and even began forgetting what she had done on the program from one day to the next. "I just didn't give a damn," she admits. "It showed."

Bedtime Stories. About the only preparation she did receive was an overblown, month-long publicity tour during which CBS executives did little to discourage the impression, fostered by a suggestive New York magazine article, that she was a blonde seductress who would do anything to get stories. Worse, certain CBS executives evidently began to believe it. Quinn describes the efforts of some of them to land her in bed, most notably those of Sixty Minutes Producer Don Hewitt, who, she says, got himself assigned to direct her coverage of Princess Anne's wedding and announced, "London is such a nice place to have an affair." Quinn also has unkind words for CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace, who was "not only telling everybody how unattractive and unintelligent I was, but was mocking my performances." (She does concede: "There is something about me that infuriates people.") In addition to all those complaints, Quinn claims that she was garroted by her former colleagues in the newspapers. "Instead of sympathy for being caught in a corporate disaster and for my own lack of experience," she says, "I got destroyed, almost always in a personal way."

Quinn resigned from CBS in February 1974, and is now back at the Post writing long detailed interviews and reports of the social scene in a style of gossipy impressionism--the kind of story she has always done best. In recent weeks, for example, she has dissected the inner life of a circus troupe and filled almost a full page with a perceptive profile of Nashville Director Robert Altman. Last November she bought a $100,000 town house a few blocks from the Post office. Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee, who was divorced this year from his wife of 18 years, has moved in with her. She reports she is 15,000 words into a projected novel on Washington politics and journalism.

Strangers still occasionally stop her on the street for her autograph, and she says that even Novelist-Poet Joyce Carol Gates recently told her that she would sit for an interview only because she was dying to meet the former TV star. (Gates denies that motive and says she does not even own a TV set.) "Don't get me wrong," Quinn says. "Being a celebrity is not entirely tedious. I like being called to do a piece for the Atlantic. I like being interviewed by TIME. I like making money. I have returned from television to discover I have a magnified reputation that does get in the way. But I am not a failure. I am not a loser."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.